The incident, at Le Cenacle restaurant in the French capital’s Tremblay-en-France suburb on Saturday night, has sparked condemnation and anger.
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The video showed the restaurant’s chief talking to Muslim women, telling them that they don’t serve Muslims.
“I don’t want people like you here”, he said.
“Gender equality can not be achieved by restricting individual freedoms including by policing what individual women choose to wear”, it said.
The unnamed man has apologized to the protesters gathered outside his building and said, “things got out of hands” because one of his friends had died at the Bataclan concert center terror attack a year ago, La Parisien stated. Soon after, the restaurant owner walked in from the kitchen and asked them to leave, adding that “Racists like me don’t kill good people”.
Henri Leroy, the mayor of Mandelieu-La-Napoule, told MailOnline that he had extended the ban until the end of September, saying that the Muslim residents of the town should be reminded that “they are French first and of Muslim confession second”.
The Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), which is supporting the women, said the incident represented a “racist shift” in French society as prosecutors opened an investigation into possible “religious discrimination”. “I spoke out of turn and I apologize, I have a friend who died in the Bataclan attacks and wrongly mixed everything up”, he said.
“The things I said I don’t really think them”.
Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations rights office, made the remarks on Tuesday after France’s highest administrative court ruled the ban on burkinis is “seriously and clearly illegal”.
The majority of French mayors who have imposed “burkini” bans are refusing to revoke them, despite a ruling from France’s highest administrative court against the ban in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet.
Laurence Rossignol, a Government Minister, described the man’s actions as “intolerable” and said that she has ordered the Dilcra, a government anti-racism body, to investigate the incident.
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He said the rule is a “grave and illegal breach of fundamental freedoms”, and noted that the agency is calling for all other burkini bans to be repealed.
